Tidings: What's New at PerlMonks

Your site maintainers are constantly improving the appearance and functions of PerlMonks
to make your experience here the best it can be.
To find out what has changed recently, or since the last time you logged in, peruse the headlines below.
Also browse recent PerlMonks Discussions for a deeper view into what's in the pipeline for PerlMonks.

If you have questions about anything you read here, you may ask about it in the Chatterbox.
If it's an issue of weightier import, you might consider posting a PMD.

Historically, comments (aka replies; technically notes) were shown below posts ordered chronologically, with the first (i.e. oldest) reply at the top, just below the post, down to the newest at the bottom.
By popular demand, the default note ordering is now 'Best First' -- the reply with the highest reputation at the top, worst reputation at the bottom.
This change primarily affects, and was primarily intended for, visitors.
It may also affect logged-in users who have never specified a Note Ordering in their User Settings.

Also, the reply ordering in effect is shown below a note, along with the "Comment on..." link. (It is not shown if there are no replies, however.)

Logged-in users can now apply a css stylesheet to nodes rendered using the 'bare' display style.
See article in PMD for details.

Community Ads nodelet removedNov 10, 2014 at 18:00 UTC

Gabor Szabo's Community Ads server is being shut down for lack of use. The PerlMonks sidebar nodelet that showed these ads has been removed. Thanks to Gabor for having provided this service.

Anonymous posting enabled againOct 20, 2014 at 10:10 UTC

We have reinstated the ability of Anonymous Monk to post (since last Thursday, 2014-10-16). The spam filters have
been improved.

Anonymous posting temporarily blockedOct 14, 2014 at 04:00 UTC

We have temporarily blocked all posting by Anonymous Monk due to a bought of rampant posting abuse.

No more "monk pics" for anonymous visitorsMay 04, 2014 at 21:00 UTC

Now anonymous visitors no longer see at the top of each page a random selection from the old photographs of monks. Non-anonymous visitors can control whether or not they see these via "Monk Pictures off" at Display Settings.

Homenodes now show a link to Super SearchOct 29, 2013 at 20:20 UTC

If you view the home node of a user (monk), you will now see a new link displayed that leads to Super Search with the user field pre-filled such that it searches among posts created by that user. For example, you would see this on merlyn's home node:

If you follow the Search nodes link, you can then fill other fields of Super Search to search for something among merlyn's writeups.

Code font big for anonymous visitorsAug 24, 2013 at 21:50 UTC

The "Large Code Font" option has been enabled for anonymous visitors. This prevents <code> sections from being wrapped in tags that slightly decrease the font size. This was the default for a very long time because fixed-width fonts can appear noticeably larger than proportional fonts of the same height. However, on some configurations, this would result in a problematically small font for code.

Note that this only impacts anonymous visitors. New users still default to having "Large Code Font" disabled. Non-anonymous users can change this setting at the Display Settings page. Anonymous visitors who dislike the particular (likely) increase in font size for code that resulted in their environment can either register to make all manner of customizations or can use a web browser that allows them to apply their own CSS customizations.

Monkday Messages Get ClassJul 08, 2013 at 16:00 UTC

The special message you sometimes see in your XP nodelet on your "monkday" (the anniversary of when you joined the Monastery)
is now stylable via CSS. It is now enclosed in a span with class="monkday".
Currently there is no styling provided for this in any of the canned themes, so you won't see a difference unless
you add something to your CSS.

You can now vote on Perl News postings while viewing the section page.

Previously, you had to click on a post and view it directly (along with its thread, if any)
in order to get at the voting buttons.

Tick tock styleJul 05, 2012 at 15:30 UTC

Those of you who use the Tick tock nodelet will notice that it is now styled a little differently.
Especially useful is the fact that each of the three time strings now has a separate css ID.
For example, you can hide the first of the three by adding the following to your CSS:

PerlMonks forms used to specify a maximum password length of 8 characters while it was possible to give yourself a 10-character password by bypassing these forms. Now the forms specify a maximum password length of 10 characters.

Google+ Page for PerlmonksNov 10, 2011 at 22:00 UTC

PerlMonks now has a Google+ Page. Add it to your circles, and it will add you back.

Inline code gets classOct 31, 2011 at 23:45 UTC

Inline code (like in chatter) now gets the class inlinecode applied to it.

"Permission Denied" now knows what it deniedJul 31, 2011 at 18:30 UTC

Now, when you receive a "Permission Denied" error, you may get additional information on the node to which access was not granted.

"Offer your reply" is historyJul 21, 2011 at 19:00 UTC

There have been some changes to the way posts are shown on "aggregate" pages, i.e. The Monastery Gates and the various sections.
The header block above each post has been reorganized, so that the title and "replies" are on the left, and the author and date are on the right.
The "replies" text has been changed so that the link to the post is in separate text ("Read more").
If — and only if — there are no replies yet, an additional link is given, directly to the "Comment on" form.
The "Offer your reply" link, which used to be in a separate right-hand column in the table, has been eliminated.

As the changeover was not entirely smooth, you may have experienced pair.com placeholders
getting served while the DNS updated. The DNS should propagate within the next 48 hours.

Lists of links receive new markupDec 15, 2010 at 21:00 UTC

Some lists of links appearing commonly on the site have been formatted with new markup.
The so-called "nav menu", which appears (by default) in the upper right corner of each page, is now coded as
<ul class="inline-list">Many of the lists appearing in nodelets are now coded as
<ul class="spacey-list">

If you would like to customize the appearance of these lists, see what's done in common.css (look for spacey-list), copy the css code into your on-site css, and modify to suit.

One known issue with the new markup is that MS Internet Explorer does not honor the li:before{content:"|"} styling, so these lists appear without any bullet/separator in IE.

index.pl is not the canonical URL anymoreNov 30, 2010 at 21:00 UTC

All URLs of the style /index.pl?... now redirect permanently (301) to /?..., as do all URLs
of the style /index.pl/foo/bar/baz?.... This should reduce the double-crawling by bots.
While that redirecting will sometime later still happen, the chosen tool, mod_rewrite, created more problems than it solved. This change was backed out again.

Can customize refresh rate for chat framesSep 28, 2010 at 20:30 UTC

Fullpage chat is an example of a frameset that makes a convenient interface for chatting via PerlMonks. You can also copy that and make your own custom frame set.

One of the frames contains a link to /?node_id=50772&displaytype=raw, which shows (some of) your private messages. This used to unconditionally refresh every 30 seconds. It now defaults to refreshing only every 60 seconds and you can append ";refresh=180" to the URL to change the refresh rate (but not to less than 30 seconds).

"Location" field is HTML-escaped for anonymous usersApr 10, 2010 at 19:00 UTC

The "Location" field is now HTML escaped for anonymous visitors. This is unfortunate, but as that field has been
used to linkspam via the website, only registered users can now choose to have this field
output HTML.

Signatures now delineated by a thin line in CSSApr 02, 2010 at 04:38 UTC

Signatures are now delineated from the main post by a thin, CSS generated line. The other themes
may change that. If a <HR> element is the first element in a signature, that
HR gets hidden. That way, old signatures look mostly the same as new signatures.

Scratchpads are only visible to logged-in usersMar 21, 2010 at 06:00 UTC

Scratchpad contents are not visible to Anonymous Monk and bots anymore. If you want to view
scratchpad contents, you need to be logged in.

New link shortcut type: wolframalphaFeb 18, 2010 at 04:00 UTC

A new shortcut has been added to link to Wolfram|Alpha: [wolframalpha://], with the shorthand alias [wa://].

[wa://10 choose 3] in posts or chatter becomes the link 10 choose 3.
See the Wolfram|Alpha site for ideas of what is possible. It's very powerful, and very cool.

As foretold in Size of text in replies when showing threads,
replies in threads are no longer being rendered with hard-coded <font size="-1"> HTML.
Replies will now appear in the same size font as the "root" node being viewed.
You are free to style replies however you wish, using your
Display Settings: Stylesheet Settings. Adding "td.reply-body { font-size: smaller; }" there will likely come close to the previous formating.

They are no longer listed in the Sections nodelet, but have been
moved to the Leftovers nodelet, alongside the link to Craft.
Also, the "nav menu" at the top of each PerlMonks page no longer
contains links to these sections.

A security-related patch made in February 2007 inadvertently caused Recently Active Threads
not to persist some of your configuration settings.
This has been fixed. Now all of your RAT settings, such as "View Mode",
will be remembered for the next time you load RAT.

Extra info in Other UsersJul 24, 2009 at 18:30 UTC

The user links listed in "Other Users" (both the nodelet and lower right pane of the fullpage chat
have extra info (added via the 'title' attribute) which you can see in most browsers by
hovering over the link.

Until recently, this tooltip-like info simply indicated that the link was to the user's
homenode. This info is now augmented with the user's group memberships, if any.
This makes it a little easier to determine if any of the users current active on-site (such as
in the chatterbox) are members of janitors, for example.

The Newest Nodes RSS feed now has the dc:creator tag to
generate attributions to the author name. It also validates against http://feedvalidator.org/. The dc:creator contents don't seem to have any effect on the FireFox 3.0 built-in RSS reader though.

Migratory changes in how threads are renderedJun 29, 2009 at 16:57 UTC

The code for rendering a thread was split up into some more subroutines and a new
data structure that allows data fetching in larger bulk sizes. Potentially, some
off-by-one errors or other glitches have crept in.

Recently Updated Home Nodes fixedJun 21, 2009 at 19:20 UTC

Recently Updated Home Nodes is a listing (linked from Newest Nodes) which, as its name indicates, shows the users who have recently committed "significant" updates to their homenodes. For quite some time now, this list was defective in that all of the newly created users showed up on it, even if they hadn't touched their homenodes. Since there are usually far more newly created users than users (new or old) who have actually updated their homenodes, this list was practically unusable.

This list will now only show what it was intended to show: those homenodes which have actually had (significant) updates recently. New users will no longer be automatically added.

Note: The fix is not retroactive; new users who were created before 2009-06-17 will remain on this list until they are, eventually, displaced (i.e. "scroll off the bottom").

We now have a Message Outbox which is just for sending private messages to another user.
Similar functionality is embedded within the Message Inbox, and accessible via the /msg command in the cb.
By having this function by itself on its own page, you can link to it, and send other people links to it.

All of the places on PerlMonks where a "send /msg to user" kind of link appears have been converted to utilize this new feature.
For example, when you are looking someone's writeup, the Send private /msg to user link right below it (next to the "Comment on" link) now takes you to the Message Outbox.

Meditations All Sections now have an RSS feed linkApr 26, 2009 at 13:00 UTC

The Meditations page All of the Section pages now contain an embedded link to an RSS feed for that section's nodes so that the feed is automatically discoverable (e.g. by browsers such as Firefox).

A new shortcut has been added to link to UNIX-oid man pages: [man://].
The target is normally just the name of a man page.
There are two options you can add as well: one to specify the "section", and one to specify the particular UNIX-oid system.
Examples:

Both "options" are suffixes, and if both are given, must be in the order shown in #4 above.
By default, the section is unconstrained. The default system appears to be FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE (currently).
To see what options are available, go here (which is also where [man://] (no target keyword) links to).

Simple Search now falls through to Super SearchJan 05, 2009 at 23:45 UTC

The site's simple search function now re-submits the query to Super Search if no exact title matches are found.
Previously, in this case, a rather crude and computationally expensive title search was done.
Using Super Search produces better results and places less load on the server.

The behavior of simple search when one or more exact title matches are found is unchanged:
If there is exactly one title match, you are taken directly to that node;
If there is more than one, you are presented a list of duplicates from which to choose.

Vote buttons have no more font informationDec 24, 2008 at 23:13 UTC

The <tt> tags around the vote buttons have been removed.

If you would like these radio buttons or their labels to have specific styling,
note that they are enclosed in a <div> which has class="vote". The magic incantation to put into the Custom CSS is:

Tutorials are still needed. Please check out Tutorials Quest
and see if you might be able to serve your PerlMonks community by
writing a tutorial. Some ideas may have been added
since the last time you checked.

We have updated the layout of homenodes to make it more obvious how you edit your user profile and to make boilerplate items easier to distinguish from user-entered content.

This also added a link that allows you to see what nodes you have previously voted upon. If you go to your own homenode, then the "Your votes" link will show you your most recent 20 votes (and then you can request to see a different range of your votes). If you go to some other user's homenode, then the "Your votes" link will only show you votes you have previously cast upon nodes authored by that user.

In a move which should dramatically reduce the number of re-posts, registered
users now see their own posts immediately after posting in a section,
even before they've been approved. All of the other rules controlling
when a user sees unapproved posts remain unchanged.

When viewing a Categorized Question, the Answers (if any) are shown below it in a table. The specific formatting of this table has changed somewhat; in particular, it now has the CSS class "paneled". Previously, it was a complicated arrangement of nested tables. This change affects those who may have had some custom styling in their display settings for this table.

New option for Nodelet displayNov 02, 2008 at 00:00 UTC

As part of our ongoing effort to give you, the monk, more control over the
look and feel of your PerlMonks experience, we have added an option for rendering the nodelets as <div> elements rather than as the traditional <table>. If you go to your Display Settings, you'll see a new checkbox at the bottom: Render nodelets as <div> instead of <table>?If this is unchecked, nodelets will be rendered in a table like so:

If you are interested in using CSS to style individual nodelets, or the header and/or body of individual nodelets, or if you're already doing so, please note that the id attributes of the <tbody>, <th>, and <td> have recently changed — that is, simplified. The pattern is now as shown here: (XP nodelet example)

In The Monastery Gates and the posting sections (Seekers of Perl Wisdom, etc.),
the metadata shown for each node includes the count of replies.
This can be either the total number of replies (all "descendents")
or just the number of direct replies (immediate "children").
You select which in your User Settings — a checkbox labeled
"Show count of all replies".

When you have selected showing only the count of direct replies
(the option is unchecked), then The Monastery Gates, etc. will show counts
labeled as "N direct replies". Previously it said
"N replies", just as in the other case.

Some users of the "No Theme" theme may have noticed that the
"Comment On" link, shown just below the top node on a thread
display page, was invisible due to a white-on-white font color
styling bug. This has been fixed, and few other minor CSS-related
improvements have been made as well.
If you find that these links now look strange, or are illegible,
you may need to refresh your cached CSS files.

Author's level title hidden by defaultSep 08, 2008 at 04:00 UTC

The site's default CSS has been updated to cause the recently included name of the author's level title to no longer be visible above each node. If you would like to (again) see each author's level title listed in their node by-lines, then go to Display Settings and add the below line to your "On-Site CSS Markup:"

The site character set has been changed from Latin-1 to Windows-1252, a superset of Latin-1. Many browsers already permitted the extra characters usefully defined by Windows-1252 despite the character set being declared (in our HTTP headers) as Latin-1, so for many this change has no direct impact.

The most visible impact should be preventing some browsers from converting super-set characters (such as separate left- and right-tilted single- and double-quote characters) into HTML entities when replying to nodes. The browsers that silently permitted these superset characters would allow posters to include them in node titles with no sign of a problem. When someone with a stricter browser replied, the browser might replace them with HTML entities (strangely half-honoring Windows-1252 by using HTML entities of Windows-1252 characters or replacing the characters with '?' or something else). So a node titled "Perling McDonalds" might get a reply titled "Re: Perling McDonald&#8217;s&#8482;".

A new shortcut type, [by://...], has been introduced.
This allows to link to any user's writeups.
It is conceptually much like [pad://...] but instead of linking to
the user's (or your own) scratchpad, it links to the Perl Monks User Search
page for that user (or yourself).
For example:
[by://vroom] ⇒ vroom's writeups.
If you omit the username, it defaults to yourself (the author).
Like other shortcut types, it provides a reasonable default for the link text.

Author attribution now usually includes author levelJul 10, 2008 at 18:24 UTC

Where posts or replies are attributed to an author (e.g. "by paco"),
the author's current monk level name may be appended, in parentheses.
This attribution is enclosed in a <span> with css class "attribution-title".

Super Search links to thread rootJun 28, 2008 at 19:34 UTC

When you do a search with Super Search, the last column of the table of nodes found shows the section of the node, or "Re:" followed by the section for notes (replies). This short section name used to be a link to the section. Now it's a link to the section only for root nodes: for notes it links to the root node of the thread the note is in.

Filtering of HTML on monk's homenodes to a restricted list of elements/attributes
is now the default. Note that the ability to disable filtering via a User Setting is likely a short-term option.

CSS change to the ChatterboxMar 31, 2008 at 16:00 UTC

Alternate lines in the (on-site) Chatterbox are now given
the odd-row and even-row CSS classes, for those
who would like to highlight the lines in some way.
Previously, every other line was
given the highlight class.
(Most users would not have noticed this, since it
requires custom CSS in Display Settings.)

Lots of Theme/Style TweaksMar 27, 2008 at 16:00 UTC

A large number of very small tweaks have been made to the site's styling,
mostly geared toward replacing hard-coded styles (colors, font sizes, etc.)
with CSS-based style controls. Hopefully, these changes are all transparent,
i.e. resulted in no or insignificant visible differences to the user. However,
just to be sure, we ask that you keep an eye out as you visit all your usual nodes,
and if you find anything odd/broken/ugly, please report it to pmdev.
Thank you.

This is a reminder that the only approved method of voting on nodes is via the form interface provided on the node display pages. Penalties, automatic or otherwise, may apply to voting via other methods. Note that buttons on some homenodes will cast votes in violation of these rules.

Message Inbox now shows folder sizesMar 17, 2008 at 16:00 UTC

The "Showing messages" configuration form at the top of Message Inbox
now shows the count of messages in each folder next to the folder name,
in parentheses.

Users of the Full-Page Chatterbox client will notice that the image buttons
in the titlebar have been replaced with text buttons. Color and font of these text buttons
are controlled by CSS. If the titlebar buttons look like actual buttons to you, it means you
need to refresh/invalidate your CSS cache.

Code no longer spoiled in Perl-Blue ThemeFeb 15, 2008 at 17:00 UTC

The Perl-Blue Theme had a non-black color for <code> text, which kind of defeated the purpose of <spoiler> tags. (Was only a problem for those who had opted to
render <spoiler> tags as 'table'.)
This has been fixed; code text is now black.

As part of a long-term conversion of the site's theme control to CSS,
certain pages have had certain specific elements converted from
hard-coded style to CSS style. We are asking all interested monks
to look for any anomalies as they use the site, and report them to
pmdev. Specific areas affected include any nodes and nodelets which
display lists of nodes, such as "best nodes" and "other users" type lists.
Also affected is Nodes to consider.

Added "Send /msg to user" link to home nodesJan 05, 2008 at 22:30 UTC

The home nodes of users now have a link to the Message Inbox
with the name of the home node owner filled in already. Thanks to bart
for suggesting the feature.

Bug fixed with below itemDec 23, 2007 at 01:50 UTC

A bug in the implementation of the next item prevented the possibility of loss of XP until now.

One can now lose XP for casting mostly down-votesDec 17, 2007 at 19:35 UTC

You can now use [mathworld://] to get a link to Wolfram's MathWorld (MathWorld), [mathworld://convolution] to search that site (convolution), or [mathworld://Convolution.html] to link to a specific page there (Convolution.html; the trailing ".html" is what causes the link to not be generated as a search).

In the Chatterbox, /em is now an alias for /meAug 09, 2007 at 16:00 UTC

In an effort to improve the breadth and depth of the articles in
the Tutorials section, the Pedagogues have created
a permanent "bulletin board" where they post requests for new
tutorials: Tutorials Quest.
New topic ideas can be submitted via /msgPedagogues.

Handy Parent and Root Links When ReplyingJun 15, 2007 at 16:34 UTC

When you're replying to a node, you will now see links to both the
parent node and the thread's root node at both the initial
"Comment on" stage and the Preview stage.
When the parent and the root are the same, only the parent is linked.
These links are accompanied by links to their corresponding authors.

It is now possible to constrain the nodes listed on Perl Monks User Search by type,
a handy enhancement to list e.g. the obfuscations or meditations of a
user, especially when coming from their homenode.

Since a node's reputation is the secret of its author, which you can see
only after voting on it, sorting by reputation is (silently) disabled
when you list another monk's nodes with this type constraint feature.
Instead, the nodes will be ordered chronologically, newest first.
(Ordering your own nodes by reputation, with type constraint, works just fine.)

In your User Settings, you can indicate to show notes (replies) in a thread
ordered 'Newest First' (in addition to a couple of other possibilities).
This setting didn't work; instead, notes were ordered oldest first.
This has been fixed. If you had this setting set to 'Newest First', you
should now expect to see a difference in how notes are ordered in threads.

Replies in a Thread have Link AnchorsMay 01, 2007 at 05:41 UTC

It is now possible to link to a reply within a thread.
This is handy if you want to link to a reply but within the context of its
containing thread. The syntax is:

Anonymous posting from certain domains is being blocked
to prevent spam, which is now on the rise due to PerlMonks' increased
visibility, which is due to....

Search engines index PerlMonksMar 07, 2007 at 01:00 UTC

We've removed the restrictions against search engine spiders indexing PerlMonks (Re^2: Are monks hibernating? (spiders)) and enough time has passed so using Google (for example) to search PerlMonks is useful. Super Search now includes a link to Google's advanced search with the restriction to only search www.perlmonks.org preloaded. And if you do a simple search (that doesn't match only one node exactly) your results will include a link that does the same search via Google.

How PerlMonks is indexed is better than it was in the past (all spiders now only index www.perlmonks.org instead of 6 different valid PerlMonks host names along with a few less valid URLs). It isn't as good as we would like it to be (we would prefer that chatter was not indexed, for example) but this is a good short-term solution until the spider-specific features are finished.

There is now a setting to define the order in which nodes are listed in each section of Newest Nodes.
As an alternative to the default ordering, which is chronological,
you can choose to order by title or by author.

The PerlMonks FAQ has been upgraded to a fully hierarchical structure.
This makes it much easier to link to sections within the FAQ and to specific questions.
Note that this involved switching the FAQ to a different node: 483072, vice 237040.
Please update your bookmarks accordingly.

New shortcut type for JavaJunkies: jj://Nov 28, 2006 at 17:00 UTC

A new shortcut type has been added, for linking to
PerlMonks' Java-related sister site, JavaJunkies:
[jj://login] ⇒ login. It accepts node IDs and
node title terms, just like on PerlMonks.

Lost node content restored from backupNov 15, 2006 at 02:41 UTC

Some node contents were lost due to MySQL table problems, most notably
in the 252000 range. They were all restored except for some
NodeReaper messages.

Main CSS now served from relative URLNov 14, 2006 at 23:53 UTC

The main PerlMonks CSS was served from the hardcoded absolute
URL http://perlmonks.org/, which caused problems
whenever DNS resolved differently for any of the other
domains used and one of the two servers was unreachable.
Now it is served with a relative URL and hence will use the
same server and connection as the rest of the page.

On 2005-09-17, the links to change your timezone at Timezone settings stopped having an effect and the support for using the backward-compatability timezones was removed from User settings. The links now work again to set your timezone and at the bottom of Timezone settings you can select a "backward" timezone (though, why would you?).

Font size for node id for replies is now adjustableNov 04, 2006 at 03:48 UTC

The node id text added in the spirit of Node ids by node titles is now
within a <span class="attribution">...</span> and can be styled
by adjusting the CSS accordingly.

The "Nodes requiring editing" list includes the date/time of each considerationNov 04, 2006 at 03:48 UTC

The CSS pages for the themes are now cacheable for
24 hours instead of 1 hour as previously.

All shortcuts now link usefully with no argumentsAug 28, 2006 at 19:00 UTC

Per the discussion Let shortcut types have useful behavior in the parameterless case, all shortcut types now link usefully
even if given with no arguments. (Certain shortcut types, such as
[pad://], [c2://], and [apc://], already had this
behavior.) In most cases, the link created will lead to the main page
or search form of the relevant site.
In cases where this does not make sense, such as [http://],
the link will go to the usage documentation.

The pubDate element of the generated RSS contained the node creation timestamp in the user-specified format instead of the RFC822 format as mandated by the RSS 2.0 standard. Now the element is output RFC822 compliant.

New RFC822 user time formatAug 21, 2006 at 23:00 UTC

The "Format for date-times" field in User Settings now accepts the string
RFC822 as a convenient alias for%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z
(This parameter controls how timestamps on nodes and various other
things are displayed to you.)

A frivolous little message has been added to the XP Nodelet to wish users a Happy MonkDay on their anniversary. Select "Show quips on XP loss/gain messages" in User Settings to enable additional quips.

Scripting (e.g. via javascript in your Free Nodelet) of these elements is thus facilitated as well.

Filter Out CB Messages Based on ContentMay 12, 2006 at 16:15 UTC

A new filter feature lets you avoid seeing messages with "offensive" content in the Chatterbox. To set it up, go to your Ignored Users Settings. For details on how it works, see the help for that page.

'ISO' date/time format now acceptableApr 28, 2006 at 12:30 UTC

The "Format for date-times" field in User Settings now accepts the string
ISO as a convenient alias for%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %Z
(This parameter controls how timestamps on nodes and various other
things are displayed to you.)

Some bots banned from back doorApr 27, 2006 at 03:00 UTC

User agents matching m/msnbot/ have been banned from "back-door" accessing the site (through http://alternate-hostname/~monkads/index.pl?...) as they were mildly suspected of contributing to the 'A' web server locking up for an extended time periodically. Other user agents (probably all) will likely be banned (will get an HTTP 403 response, "Forbidden, use http://perlmonks.org/ instead") in future.

Previously, the 'View scratchpad' link on homenodes would lead to either public or private pads, depending on your last explicitly selected one. This had its purpose, but was counterintuitive to most people. It now DWYM, and goes to public pad everytime.
Relevant PMD: Scratchpad Bug